From Library Journal
For those struggling to understand and explain the voting behavior of Americans, Miller and Shanks, two prominent academic political scientists, offer one of the most comprehensive analyses of the subject. Not since the classic The American Voter was published in 1960 has a book attempted such a sweeping examination of American voting patterns. Using National Election Studies (NES) survey results from 1952 to 1992, the authors test the accuracy of a number of variables (age, education, partisan identification, candidate personality, issue salience, etc.) in explaining voting trends. Among the more interesting findings are the continued importance of partisan identification for voters outside the South, changes in partisan identification that have occurred in the South, and the "nonalignment" and noninvolvement of new voters entering the electorate in the 1970s and 1980s. While the book may be difficult reading for those not conversant in the terminology of voting research, it is an excellent example of such research and should become the standard reference work in the field. For academic and larger public collections.?Thomas J. Baldino, Wilkes Univ., Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
[I]n
The New American Voter we have a book every bit as grand and ambitious as its predecessors. The breadth of research is impressive. The authors have two of the most distinguished careers in American social sciences. (Michael C. Dawson
Chicago Tribune )
This is an important book by two important political scientists...The genius of Miller's and Shanks' telling of the tale...lies in the careful unfolding of [their] theses in an almost tangible texture of human context in which the American electorate takes on the flavor of the real, breathing and behaving organism that makes politics--as distinguished from the study of mass political behavior. The authors' ability to touch those dimensions simultaneously is, in very large part, what makes this a landmark book...
The New American Voter is unquestionably a major contribution, and will be a touchstone for scholars making their way along our generation's paths to understanding the reasons and the meaning of political behavior in the last half of the twentieth century. (Michael Kahan
Presidential Studies Quarterly )
It should be no surprise that this long-awaited volume will become an instant classic among voting studies. This effort by Miller (one of the field's founders) and Shanks (an accomplished scholar) caps more than four decades of using survey research to explain individual voting behavior in US presidential elections...Every page shows sophisticated minds at work, raising multiple explanations, sorting them out with cutting-edge methodologies, and thereby moving knowledge forward. All this is made possible by the rich data generated by National Election Studies, one of Miller's many legacies to political research...[A] pathbreaking study. (
Choice )
For those struggling to understand and explain the voting behavior of Americans, Miller and Shanks, two prominent academic political scientists, offer one of the most comprehensive analyses of the subject. Not since the classic
The American Voter was published in 1960 has a book attempted such a sweeping examination of American voting patterns...[This book] is an excellent example of [voting] research and should become the standard reference work in the field. (
Library Journal )
